Shopify is poised for AI-driven shopping agents to change everything, exec says

Shopify is preparing for the transformation of a lifetime, according to its president, Harley Finkelstein. Speaking at this year’s Upfront Summit in Los Angeles, the long-time e-commerce expert talked about how the company does all things shopping through agents.

Shopify is the second largest e-commerce provider in the United States after Amazon in America. But only about 18% of retail purchases in the United States are made online, Finkelstein says. Agentic can change that by serving as a new front door for e-commerce sellers.

“We’re going to start using these agent apps as these kind of personal shoppers,” he said, adding that the initial rollout will be slow. Agent personal shoppers are expected to represent the future of shopping in some ways, as they are able to discover, purchase and compare products for consumers more effectively.

Agents will add context to shopping, something traditional search engines don’t currently do well, Finkelstein said. He gave an example of searching for sports shoes. He said one of his favorite brands is On.

“Agentic is basically merit-based, unlike if you go to a search engine, type in sneakers, you’ll see Footlocker,” he said. But once his shopping agent knows his preference for running shoes, the next time he looks for such shoes, the agent will do a better job of representing options from On, rather than options sold at popular retailers like Footlocker.

We point out that this is a bit simplistic. Existing search engines already customize shopping or search offers to fit a person’s search and browsing history.

But it’s also true that dealership shopping should one day be able to take a person’s preferences into account at a much higher level.

“We’ll still be influenced by the people we see, the people we see on social media, on TV, but I think the chat app is actually a more authentic personal shopper because it’s generally not commission-based, which means it will only show you things that it thinks you’ll be more likely to buy,” he said.

He added that there are a lot of merchants on Shopify who struggle with getting their products discovered, “and in fact, this is where we think agents will play a big role in highlighting new brands to these customers.”

Shopify is currently building an AI assistant for merchants called Sidekick, he said. It also builds an agent to handle support and protocol issues so agents can better understand merchant data, such as product details. Overall, he believes agent shopping will be another thread on the retail operating machine.

“We are probably more excited about this new era of trading than ever before because we believe it will create a lot of opportunities, not just for large traders, but for a long line of traders,” he said.